A warmer and dryer February appears ready to give way to a wetter and cooler March, meteorologist Clay Anderson with the Albuquerque office of the National Weather Service, said Thursday.

A snow event is forecast for Tuesday into Wednesday that could deliver one to two feet of the white stuff on the mountain peaks, followed by a second round not quite as wet late in the week, he said.

February was dryer and warmer than normal for New Mexico, Anderson said. Albuquerque experienced its 6th warmest recorded March. Roswell saw its average temperature go up by 2.5 degrees, and at the high end, experienced temperatures 5.7 degrees higher, he said. But temperatures (in Ruidoso) definitely will be dipping below normal Monday night and through much of the week.

" At the end of March, they may be around average for the entire month, because you got off to such a warm start and that could skew it," he said.

"Obviously, there has been a strong El Nino in place," Anderson said. "The Pacific Ocean has been warmer than normal, which would generally lean toward above normal precipitation for much of the state."

But everything seemed to stall in February.

"Our focus really is on the sea surface temperature gradient, or the differences in the sea surface temperatures in the eastern equatorial Pacific, which would lend itself toward producing big thunderstorms over the Pacific Ocean, which would transport that moisture up into the atmosphere and allow the jet stream northeast or east over the Southwest United States. But that just hasn't materialized, because that sea surface temperature gradient is not there like it has been in the past with strong El Ninos."

The last time the gradient and other factors worked together to produce a whopper of an El Nino was the winter of 1997-1998, he said.

"We are anticipating a pattern change that's going to begin to occur over the weekend," he said. "Basically, it will allow the jet stream to dip further south across the far eastern Pacific and into the West Coast. It's going to pick up some of that moisture and bring it inland and we're going to end up with a series of systems that are going to move across the region beginning early next week."

The first system will favor southern and eastern New Mexico, he said.

"So Ruidoso will be right there," he said. "In fact, it could be really wet. It has been (unusually) warm and really dry for the past six to seven weeks, but that's about to change."

The computer model is showing snow from Ski Apache Resort and all the way down to Ruidoso. Anderson said.

"It looks like the onset will be Tuesday morning, possibly starting as rain, but definitely transitioning into snow by Tuesday night," he said. "The critical time period is Tuesday night into Wednesday morning.

"There still is a lot of uncertainty in the forecast at that point, but it looks like there will be a lot of moisture available and potentially could be a wetting event for Lincoln County, in general. If it is as wet as the computer model is indicating, that impacts the fire weather season, delaying that considerably. It just takes one good wetting event in March for that to happen. It looks like another system will move in on the heels of the first one later in the week, but the first may be more wetting."

Longer term, forecasting becomes more difficult, he said.

"But the month of March should become increasingly wet," he said. "It seems like in all strong El Ninos in the past, New Mexico has done well during the month of March for precipitation. April and May become increasingly more difficult to forecast.